THE POLAR GARDEN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 83

row's Quarterly Review article calling for a new generation of polar explorers to complete the
quest for a northwest passage. 30
After two and a half years living with Percy Shelley, Mary had a gimlet eye for dangerous
romantic excess in men. She saw it plainly in the “boy's own” Arctic propaganda of John
Barrow. Barrow's roll call of patriotic polar adventurers, for “men zealous for their country's
weal, and the honour of science,” inspired in Mary the idea of an Arctic frame narrative for
her novel. 31 The opening and closing chapters of Frankenstein feature an idealistic but inept
polar explorer named Walton who rescues Frankenstein, his doomed alter ego, on the frozen
northern wastes. His role in the novel is to bear sympathetic witness to Frankenstein's death
and to record his tragic history. If Barrow intended his polar journalism to rouse the spirit of
masculine adventure and national ambition in his readers, he thus failed utterly with Mary
Shelley. Instead, through the figure of Walton, she turned a laser-like skepticism on Barrow's
windy mythology of the Arctic, in which she detected the same hubris and reckless disregard
for human costs that characterize her protagonist Frankenstein.
Evidence from the text of Frankenstein suggests that Mary found material for the Walton
character in one passage from the Quarterly Review article in particular, in which Barrow
mockingly recounts the misadventures of a low-ranked naval officer named Duncan who, in
1790, set out to explore the northern reaches of Hudson Bay in Canada. “Never,” wrote Bar-
row, “was man more sanguine of success in any undertaking than Mr. Duncan.” Frankenstein ,
likewise set in the 1790s, correspondingly opens with Walton's airy optimism: he dreams he
will discover an open Arctic sea “where frost and snow are banished … a land surpassing in
wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe … a perpetual
splendour.” But Shelley's Walton, like his historical counterpart Duncan, soon finds himself
beset by ice, misfortune, and a mutinous crew. Barrow's contemptuous description of Dun-
can's failed efforts—“grief and vexation so preyed on his mind as to render a voyage which
promised every thing, completely abortive”—in turn offered Mary Shelley the perfect mod-
el for Walton's shame at the conclusion of Frankenstein , when he abandons his quest for the
Edenic North Pole of his imagination, acutely “disappointed” and quasi-suicidal. 32
In the concluding drama surrounding the abandonment of Walton's polar quest, Shelley's
Dr. Frankenstein is made to sound like John Barrow himself. In an impassioned speech he
delivers to Walton's crew, Frankenstein implores them not to abandon their “glorious exped-
ition” but to “return as heroes who have fought and conquered” the terrors of the Arctic.
His patriotic rhetoric, like Barrow's on the British public, has a spellbinding effect: “when he
speaks, they no longer despair; he rouses their energies, and, while they hear his voice, they
believe these vast mountains of ice are mole-hills, which will vanish before the resolutions
of man.” 33 For the reader, however, Frankenstein's speech, like his scientific idealisms, rings
hollow. We take leave of Shelley's novel persuaded that the romantic quest for a northwest
passage stands second only to the reawakening of corpses with electricity as an example of
extreme human folly. Her friend and fellow polar skeptic, Lord Byron, put it with customary
pith:
…voyages to the Poles,
Are ways to benefit mankind, as true,
Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo. 34